


Knowledge

by deathwailart



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Character Study, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, On the Run
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-19
Updated: 2012-08-19
Packaged: 2017-11-12 11:14:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/490270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A companion piece to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/372788">Stranger to Kindness</a></p>
    </blockquote>





	Knowledge

**Author's Note:**

> A companion piece to [Stranger to Kindness](http://archiveofourown.org/works/372788)

Hawke knows things that Anders will never know, not in an intimate fashion apart from the few times he makes a token attempt to join in until he sits back (he doesn't sulk, he is an Apostate, a former Grey Warden, he carries the Spirit of Justice within him and Justice does not sulk) and watches Hawke just get on with it. Hawke has lived this life that maybe Anders might have lived if he hadn't been stolen from his parents, marched across the country by Templars who he despised and despises even now, the reason that no one knows his name, not even Hawke. They took everything from him but that and it's locked away, not safe but jealously guarded. It's one of those little things that can turn a good day into a terrible day where he says little, keeping his thoughts to himself, a vicious cycle and even though Hawke knows what's going on and to his credit knows when he should try to cajole Anders with teasing words or when to just leave well enough alone, it's something that will forever bother him. There's a trust he has with Hawke that he hasn't had with anyone but Karl and that was different then, he and Karl were equal in circumstance but Karl was that bit older, wiser, he'd soothed Anders through the worst injustices of the Circle, through his escapes, his punishments, that long torturous year of solitude where he thought (or feared, sometimes it's hard to remember when there's a sort of resigned air that comes with thinking about that time) he might go mad. He'd been there when Anders had made it through his Harrowing, exhausted and drained, so ready to scream - why didn't they warn them, why throw them to the wolves like that. How many lives had needlessly been sacrificed in a trial by fire? Why not teach them, help them to understand it better.  
  
He tells Hawke as often as possible whenever the subject of family comes up, how lucky Bethany was to never go through that ordeal.  
  
Anders will never be able to trust someone fully, the way Hawke trusts him, trusted all of them once. At times it's honestly overwhelming how open Hawke is when it comes to the people in his life, when he gives and gives, checks in on them (well, when they were all in Kirkwall, when life was almost pleasant most of the time with a stability Anders never thought he would ever touch) and goes out of his way to aid them. Leandra was a wonderful woman for the brief moments Anders had with her but he wondered how she felt, to watch her son, her only child not lost to the great beyond or lost to some secretive thing, doing almost as she had. Binding himself to an Apostate the way she had with Malcolm. Hawke has to be like his father, he believes but there's no one he can ask, not Hawke even though Hawke would gladly tell him. Anders feels that the trade between them is uneven enough as it is without more being added, Anders revealing more than he ever has but unable to open up entirely, some part of him too damaged, not a festering wound but an old one that aches in the cold and damp, familiar enough not to be crippled with self-consciousness over but still guarded, still hesitant on those bad days.  
  
Still, they do talk because there isn't really much else to do when you are the two most wanted people in all of Thedas, hearing rumours of what Varric is up to, picking up his stories when they can because Varric is Varric, feeding lies and misinformation mixed with truth and vice versa, cackling away to himself in his cosy quarters.  
  
"I wonder if Gamlen has the estate again," Hawke says one day and Anders laughs, shaking his head.  
  
"He's in for a surprise when he gets to the bedroom," he manages to get out around the laughter, wiping at his eyes.  
  
"Or the study," the other man continues before looking as though he's just stepped in something revolting.  "On second thoughts, no, I don't want to think about my uncle and any book Isabela has ever seen fit to slip into my library."  
  
"If you've ruined potatoes or anything along the lines of tubers for me Hawke I swear to the Maker..."  
  
Hawke kisses him, an overdone flourish that hurts Anders knees and Hawke's back but neither complains. At least not until the dog gets jealous and barrels into them at ramming speed, sending them both sprawling in the dirt.  
  
Hawke tells him things about Lothering that sometimes just don't fit with him when Hawke is so tall and tanned from long hours in the sun with his shaggy dark hair and bear. Like the fact that Hawke has helped to deliver a baby (that one was admitted whilst drunk and Anders swore never to tell Varric about it) when the woman next door went into labour while Hawke chopped wood for her just outside her home. He admitted that it was easier in some ways than helping during calving ("cows can kick _hard_ Anders," he had complained and Anders had called him a big baby) but more stressful in many other more obvious ways. It makes Anders look at his hands differently for a while; Anders always looks at hands because he remembers how much his have changed, especially now, out here and on the run from everyone hunting him and Hawke by extension. Hawke's hands are shaped from his swords, the two-handed monstrosities he wields, as tall as him, heavy and deadly and from hard work, calluses and old lines that were once scars, rough no matter how often they're covered in salve although Anders has taken over that duty of attending to wounds. Once, Anders had soft hands. There was no biting rain or blistering sun in the tower. No hard labour to shape them and harden them. Just his stave leaving marks, indentations where the skin is harder. Anders has hands that channel magic, bursts of flame or ice, a soft glow to heal, conjuring rocks or shaping glyphs. Anders has hands that are stained with so much blood, a stain he won't ever wash off even if it isn't exactly guilt he feels but there is something, Varric would know the word if he were here but he's not, just him and Hawke and the loyal Mabari meandering their way through Thedas.  
  
They never stay in one place for long, unwilling to risk it, with Templars and Mages and other everyday people who might take offense and summon a mob to come after them. He refuses to be parted with Hawke unless in the horrible event that they go together, no Chantry to come between them, not when Hawke stayed with him despite what he'd done even if he gets the feeling that a part of Hawke still condemns him for it, won't ever truly forgive him but it's...well it's not fine but he understands. Hawke is a good man, a decent man, honest and upright with a wicked and sometimes odd sense of humour who tried to find another way every time he could and even if he says he would have helped, everyone knows that Hawke would have told Anders to find another way that didn't involve so much death and destruction. Hawke would never have let a war spread across the world, leaving chaos in its wake. Not every Mage wants this attention, their position precarious enough prior and sometimes when they stumble across them they fight more zealously and viciously than any Templar that never lives to tell the tale of the Champion and Apostate making their way from country to country. He wonders how many might remember Hawke should they decide to go to Lothering. They could live quietly. Anders could heal, mix salves, poultices, potions, Hawke could do whatever odd jobs needed doing keeping them safe but it's only a dream, a foolish one. Once you're gone, you can't go back. That's how it works, all these places that were once a home that have now slipped through their fingers. The Anderfels (he was just a little boy but it's impossible, he can't make himself return to that place), Lothering, Kirkwall, pieces of old lives that cannot be reclaimed. Maybe it would have been better if Hawke hadn't come with him, then he might have been free to return to wherever he wanted. They had one fight about that, Anders wanting to push Hawke away because he didn't understand how Hawke could be willing to give up a settled home for him, a fight that had ended with Hawke spelling things out to him: that so long as he had Anders, he had home.  
  
Apostates don't get that sort of love. That's the sort of love you hear about in real romance novels, not Rivaini or Antivan filth, no, that declaration had been what you read about in old books when there was usually chivalry and some maiden involved, something like that. Anders tended to stick to the filthy books when he was younger and then he didn't have as much time for them.  
  
"You know," Hawke says that morning as they break camp (another thing Hawke is far better at, pitching tents and packing everything equally, hunting for food - he says, his voice and eyes far away, that he used to do this with Carver and then he'd done it at Ostagar too - and doing all the bits and pieces Anders would fumble with when he'd been on the run until finally he'd managed to succeed, more through dumb luck than anything else) and try to plan where they should go to next, "you were a Warden once and I'd be a terrible big brother if I didn't stop by and check on Bethany."  
  
Anders hesitates. After all he left the Wardens and he's not going back but still, a place they might be welcome? A place where no one will be ready to stick a knife in their back?   
"We could, it wouldn't hurt to find out how the Warden-Commander is taking it, it's been years since I last saw her."  
  
"Do you have any idea how she'd take the war?" Hawke asks as gently as he can, scratching Dog behind the ears. Sometimes Anders forgets that he knows two of the greatest figures in recent history, the Hero of Ferelden and the Champion of Kirkwall.  
  
"She was a Circle Mage like me, we knew each other once, a long time ago," he pauses to amend his story, shouldering his pack to make sure it isn't in the way of his stave, "a long time ago _before_ Kirkwall, same tower and everything although the First Enchanter's favourite was probably discouraged from spending time with the wannabe Apostate." It's amazing how that can make him smile now, a more innocent time when he was so righteous in his anger, much more idealistic.  
  
"Do you have any idea what she'd think?"  
  
"Remember when I told you about Jowan?" Hawke nods, Anders having told him about Circle life, little bits and pieces like Ser-Pounce-A-Lot and the friends he'd had. "Well she let him go in the end, I never heard what happened to him but she didn't punish him or anything like that. If the cause is right...she can be fair."  
  
"She would have had to make hard choices during the Blight." Hawke was there, Anders knows that. Fighting for King and country, fighting against an evil that can scarcely be comprehended alongside his brother but still he lost his home and said brother - it's selfish to say that Anders would never change a thing because he can't imagine life without Hawke. Anders would be dead or locked up, lonely, bitter.  
  
"We'll go," Anders decides, forging onward. "It's important that she knows how things really happened, besides, you still have to meet her and I'll be happy to introduce you both. If she doesn't set me on fire or something or if Nathaniel isn't being the zealous guard dog yet again."  
  
They set off with Dog loping along at their heels, still tired, still sore. Anders has stiff knees that hurt when at the end of a long day when he finally sits down, Hawke has aches and pains at the small of his back and everything smells of damp dog even when it hasn't rained for days. But he wouldn't trade it for the world; Anders knows that really, in the ways that matter, that it doesn't get any better than this.


End file.
